Mention what is the function of garbage collection in Ruby on Rails?

Garbage collection in Ruby on Rails serves the following key functions:

• It automatically frees up memory occupied by objects that are no longer being used by the program, allowing the memory to be reused[1][2]. This frees the programmer from having to manually track and deallocate unused objects.

• It uses a mark-and-sweep algorithm to identify unreachable objects and reclaim their memory[2][3]. Objects that are still reachable from root objects (e.g. local variables) are marked as live, while unreachable objects are swept and their memory freed.

• Ruby uses generational garbage collection, maintaining separate object spaces for "young" and "old" objects[2]. It focuses collection efforts on the young generation where most garbage tends to be.

• The GC module provides an interface to control various aspects of garbage collection[4]. For example, GC.start initiates a garbage collection cycle, ...